VMware Tools Available as Open Source

VMware  has released “a majority” of its VMware
Tools as open source software. The announcement, part of the company’s Open
Virtual Machine Tools (Open-VM-Tools) project, was made today at its VMworld
conference in San Francisco.

The company said VMware Tools is a set of guest operating system virtualization components designed to improve the performance and management of VMware virtual machines.

The source code of Open-VM-Tools, hosted at Sourceforge, enables Linux vendors to integrate open source VMware Tools into upcoming versions of their operating systems.

Stephen Herrod, VMware’s vice president of technology development, said
the Open-VM-Tools project will improve customers’ ability to use the latest
and diverse guest operating systems, as well as pave the way for a wide
variety of virtual appliances.

VMware said it’s working with operating system vendors, including Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu, to integrate the tools into their operating system installation processes.

Holger Dyroff, vice president of SUSE Linux Enterprise product management at
Novell, said VMware is helping his company provide a best-in-class
enterprise virtualization operating system.

“Being able to package and
bundle Open Virtual Machine Tools as part of SUSE Linux Enterprise will
provide our mutual customers a more seamless
and better supported platform for virtualization,” he said in a statement.

Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s enterprise Linux business, noted
VMware’s efforts “around the community development of paravirt-ops
, which provides an open interface for Linux virtualization across all
hypervisors.”

Paul Poppleton, a senior staff IT
engineer at Qualcomm, said such integration will help his company reduce
costs and better support its virtualized Linux deployment.

“This gives us and other companies a significantly more streamlined path
in deploying and updating in-guest components,” said Poppleton in a
statement. “In fact, deploying a Linux guest operating system will be as
simple as installing the guest — no additional steps required.”

Open-VM-Tools joins VMI (virtual machine interface), which is part of the Linux kernel, in VMware’s open source bucket. The VMworld conference runs through Thursday of this week.

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